Sunday, September 22, 2013

Free To Move About

Movement takes intention. When movement happens, an amazing process begins. The former is a statement. The latter is how I refer to what I am learning right now. Segment two of Anat Baniel's training for practitioners is happening right now and I am thankful to be a part of it.

So, Anat told us today that movement takes intention. According to Merriam-Webter's Dictionary, intention is: "the thing that you plan to do or achieve: an aim or purpose." Sometimes during movement lessons, I'm not exactly sure what I'm planning to do. I realized, watching Anat demonstrate on a fellow student, that permission is a big thing. I need to give myself permission to do things. I need it to approximate where my limbs need to be to be able to do certain things. Let me repeat, I needed to give myself permission. No one else could give me that. They couldn't tell me exactly what I needed to do to get there. It was up to me to do it.

Permission has become, at least for me, almost subconscious. I don't want to wax political, but feel like a large part of this is how we are educated. Is this for a grade? In school I was overly concerned about getting an A. Somewhere in life I learned that this was a necessity, and this is unavoidable. As children, permission from our caregivers is necessary for our safety and well-being. But there are other times when it is superfluous. This is getting rid of the noise.

So yesterday, I had to give myself permission to turn my head so I could get my arm to the floor on the opposite side of my body. It took lots of little tiny permissions from myself to get there. I had to eliminate noise little by little.

And I had no idea before this that I needed any permission. Today, Anat used me in one of her demonstrations. Before I could even give myself permission to get my leg to where I was intending it to go, it was going there. It was going way past "there" and other parts of me were moving too. And I had no idea they were not moving before.

I had no idea what type of process was happening after I left segment one of training either. When I came home I was integrated. My brain was organized. I spent time keeping it that way. Then I got caught up in travels, and life in general. When we are not using intention, disintegration happens. Well, it totally did.

Anat has been talking about how the natural tendency is to move toward the baseline. This comes a relief to hear. As time progressed between segments, I got back into habits that let the noise back in. As the habituation set in, I found myself in a dark place. This was shortly after my last post. Reading the news, mulling over the Stapleton story, and falling back into pushing myself too hard at home landed me in a place where I was face to face with darkness. It was the manifestation of many things left unexamined and unprocessed. All of it felt tangled into a giant, heavy ball. I had disintegrated. Without giving it a word, I faced it. The word was permission. Freedom.

Now, back in training, I am reintegrating. Completely unexpected. For some reason I had this idea in my head that this process was going to be linear.

This integrate, disintegrate, reintegrate process is part of the healing process not just in terms of physical neurology, but emotional trauma too. I have wrestled with grief, but I think in the past couple of weeks I faced it. It wasn't of my own volition either. I came home from segment one enthused, excited, and genuinely in awe of everything around me. Much of the noise had been eliminated and I was more organized neurologically.  Something in me during the period of newness in reorganization had started to happen. I began to really grieve, I think.

Emotions started coming from everywhere. Sometimes I could slow down and figure out what to do. At other times, I didn't. But I knew I needed to start untangling that giant messy ball of thread. So I did, thinking all the threads would be in straight lines. But as reintegration happens, I've noticed that they are more organic. Some are curving. Some are little zigzags, some are seemingly random lines. Regardless, they are not a ball now, but taking different paths.

Progress feels like a fractal. It is going back, regressing, and then making progress. Because without that disintegration, the progress would be linear. It would be just a line. Instead, there are patterns and shape to the process which creates beautiful shapes. It is organic....and it takes effort, and is scary and new and rewarding and beautiful.

The important thing is learning to do this more and more. All I have to do is move.










1 comment:

  1. beautifully written shana...so honest and unapologetic and loving...you go girl....keep writing and educating us all through your experience of being a loving parent and a anat baniel learner and sharer...your 'sparky' curiosity will make you a wonderful practitioner and asset to your community....

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